Bears in tight spot with salary cap

One of the undesired consequences of trading Gabe Carimi to the Buccaneers is the possibility that a player in the near future recalls the offensive lineman’s offseason and pursues a similar exit strategy.

The Bears didn’t have to trade the former first-round pick to Tampa Bay for a sixth-round pick in the 2014 draft. They could have forced Carimi to show up this week for the mandatory minicamp and then put him to work with the third team throughout training camp and preseason before considering their options at the end of August. Perhaps Carimi would have turned heads. Perhaps he would have offered little value moving forward. We’ll never know.

Yes, it’s possible there would have been no taker for Carimi’s contract at that time and that would have left the Bears on the hook for his entire 2012 base salary – a guaranteed figure of $1,016,458, money that would have counted against the team’s salary cap. By trading Carimi, the Bucs now inherit that contract so they will be footing the bill for this season. Carimi still counts $907,918 against the cap, the pro-rated portion of his signing bonus, but the club got $1 million in cap relief and as Dan Pompei points out, that helped the Bears add defensive tackle Sedrick Ellis to the mix on Tuesday.

The fact is the Bears are in a very tight position right now with the salary cap. According to NFL bookkeeping, before the series of roster moves (trading Carimi, waiving Evan Rodriguez and signing Tony Fiammetta, signing Ellis and the moves at wide receiver) the Bears had the second-lowest amount of cap space in the NFL. Prior to the Carimi trade, the Bears had $1.77 million in cap room using the Rule of 51 with their adjusted cap figure of $128.909 million. Only the Washington Redskins, facing one more year of extreme cap penalties from the NFL, had less space with just more than $1.4 million in room.

So, that makes it clear that decisions made by general manager Phil Emery between now and the start of the season will weigh cap implications. There’s just no getting around it because the Bears will need room to operate during the regular season.

The Bears could create some cap room with a multi-year contract for defensive tackle Henry Melton. The franchise tag guarantees him $8.45 million this season and that cap figure could be whittled down with a four- or five-year deal. However, finding common ground before the July 15 deadline could be tricky.